Steam Link Review

The Steam Link is a piece of hardware made by Valve corporation so you can play your Steam games on your living room TV over a network. It is quite a small device but heavy for its size.

Setting it up is fairly simple. You plug it in and boots up for the first time, downloads updates then tests the network. It asks you to plug in a mouse, keyboard or controller. If you have a computer with Steam running on the network it should detect it and you simply click on that computer. You enter a one time password then it should load Steam in big picture mode on your TV. From there you navigate to a game in the Steam library and start playing.

The unit has 3 USB ports which is enough for a keyboard, mouse and controller. It supports the Steam controller, Xbox for windows controllers and a few others. The HDMI port accepts HD streaming over the network at 1080p resolution and looks good over a 100mbps wired network. For it to work properly on a wireless network you will have to have no other wireless devices using the network or you will get occasional stuttering and frame drops. I could not notice any lag from when I pushed a button to when the action happens on the screen.

I tested it with an Xbox 360 for windows controller and it worked on all the games that are listed as controller supported. Some games that still work with a controller on the computer would not work on the Steam Link. F1 2015 for example. I was able to fix this by purchasing a program called Virtualhere for the steam link and was able to play non Steam games like Need for Speed on the Orign platform. But this was short lived as one day all the games that worked with help of Virtualhere no longer worked any more. I tried searching the forums for fixes and tried everything but nothing would work. So I would say this device is not just a desktop streamer. Although you can control the Windows desktop from the Steam Link, it is built to work with the Steam client and it does that really well. I was also able to get games to play in 5.1 surround sound through an Amplifier. One annoying thing is that there is no on button. To turn it on you hit a key on the keyboard or move the mouse. So if you bump the mouse on the coffee table it will turn on and interrupt anything you are watching on TV. It also turns on when you unplug a device from the USB port.

This is a good little device. It does well what it was built for, to stream Steam games to the TV in the living room over a wired network.

Update:

So I was able to fix the problem with non Steam games not working with the Xbox controller for windows. In the settings menu I unselected the Xbox 360 configuration in the controller settings. To fix the controller stick acting like a mouse I changed the default configuration when not in a game to generic gamepad. So I'm changing the score as it can play non steam games with a controller. Instead of 7.9/10 I give it.

8.3/10